Archive for April 2008

This past weekend, I was in San Francisco for a client meeting, conference and some pre-sales work. As usual, I had forgotten to buy some music I wanted to listen to over the weekend, and my MacBook (the personal computer with all the music) was 400 miles away.

What did I do? Did what any self-respecting iPod Touch user would do: bought the music anyways through WiFi. It took me less than two minutes to go through the purchase process, truly an impulse buy that all music vendors aspire to.

Something so simple as buying music through thin air is another reason why Apple is so far ahead of the pack: the iPod experience connected to iTunes are clearly such a superior experience that other vendors are going to have a hard time catching up.

In other words, Apple has figured out how to sell out how to sell the razors and razorblades — clearly how usability and a superior user experience leads to a better bottom line.

Need a disposable email address? GuerillaMail is for you. You can sign up for the service, and it will create email addresses that are good for 15 minutes, perfect for those online services that will eventually resell those email addresses and spam you.

How we deal with clients and how they view our professionalism is sometimes more important than what we know, especially in the field of User Experience where our knowledge is treated at about the same level as a fortune teller. I've told some of my reports that likable and professional is more billable than knowledgeable.

I asked this question over at LinkedIn (I've grown to like the site, and it really is a powerful networking tool). I'm going to publish some of the answers every week, and you can respond to them, or not. Sometimes the answers will repeat – my apoligies. I will give credit where credit is due, and I'm going to try to live by some of these.

Browser Shots takes a screen shot of your website for quality assurance purposes in over 40 browsers available on the web — testing it across the board in PC, Mac, and Linux platforms. Excuse me while I fix some issues I found in Galeon 1.3.20.

I have this standard joke because it’s my line of work, which really didn’t exist too long ago: “The internet’s a fad, it’s just going to go away.” While it might be dramatizing it, I do feel that it is if we don’t improve the user experience of applications and websites, like Facebook, so they aren’t just marketing spam. While end users may not be the brightest bulbs in the world, they’re not stupid, and they know when they are being fooled.

I like FaceBook. I’ve hired people off of FaceBook, and find it more useful from a profile standpoint (but less entertaining) than MySpace, but not as useful as LinkedIn. However, I had to do some housecleaning the other day, and I deleted over 100 applications.

Part of the problem is how most of these application developers design the applications, and nothing is a better illustration than what my online budy Andy Sternberg pointed out using an application on my own profile — that since I’ve installed an application, there’s this implicit “wow, Patrick must really like it.”

No, I don’t like it. My friends are selling me, and I’m not getting any of the profits.

A lot of these applications and even some websites, like Reunion.com (I’m not just bringing them up because I interviewed there years ago, but because I know the CEO knows better, and the David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times also brought it up) are using shady ways to promote themselves, like harvesting friend lists and so on.

Note to application developers — if the applications are usable, engaging, and cool, people will use it in droves. They’ll tell your friends. They won’t worry about being forced to tell 10, or 12, or 20 friends. Facebook probably doesn’t know how it’s damaging their reputation, or if they do know, how to fix it.

I think I mentioned this before, but I had a stint as an editor in chief at a local community newspaper (legals paper). I learned a lot there and as the same as a college paper. Writing blogs is much like writing smaller articles for newspaper — you have to make the short seem interesting, and writing less is much, much harder that writing more, especially if you want to make it relevant. Copyblogger has some pretty good tips on what we should be learning from newspapers, and applying to writing for blogs.

A shout out to this blog for providing a link to an Excel worksheet that is a good starting point for doing a SharePoint implementation (or reviewing an existing implementation). It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but there’s a lot of great information even for experienced MOSS Architects.

I attend user groups occasionally, and last night was the Orange County MOSS User Group (I think that’s the title). I do it because it’s good to get out to actual users as opposed to design’y people that worry about the color of the button, where most people just want a button that works.

Long story short, one of the people had an interesting paradox: how do you get people to use SharePoint when they are using the voice mail system for everything?

He works for a local restaurant chain, and most of the users are restaurant managers that are too busy managing their restaurant to report on issues. They are supposed to log the going’s on in MOSS, and now instead of using a diary, they use the voice mail system, because it records all the messages.

He’s talking about some of the issues, and there are some very interesting patterns, most of which are cultural because of the nature of the users he’s dealing with.

I suggested that instead of trying to force them onto SharePoint, do the opposite and let technology do all the work — there’s some voice mail software that will transcribe the message to text, and save the audio message. You can probably hook that up to MOSS, and thus save the messages and the voice mails themselves for archival. Sure, there’s a loss of potential meta data, but that could be cured other ways.

But it brings up an interesting point: how many of us have run into an environment where user adoption issues are so severe, the technology just doesn’t get used? Square hole, round peg, right? That’s why we write personas, so we can understand the culture of the people that we work with.

In this case, the restaurant managers are not computer users — if you studied their usage patterns, they are probably recording their voice mails on the way home after a long day on their feet (and they would drive home and record the message instead of sitting in front of a computer). So sitting them in front a blog probably wouldn’t happen.

How we deal with clients and how they view our professionalism is sometimes more important than what we know, especially in the field of User Experience where our knowledge is treated at about the same level as a fortune teller. I've told some of my reports that likable and professional is more billable than knowledgeable.

I asked this question over at LinkedIn (I've grown to like the site, and it really is a powerful networking tool). I'm going to publish some of the answers every week, and you can respond to them, or not. Sometimes the answers will repeat – my apoligies. I will give credit where credit is due, and I'm going to try to live by some of these.

Imagine if you could keep track of all of your friends and what they are doing on social networks, and at the same time your friends are notified about what you are doing? FriendFeed does that, and more.

You can share your notifications one of two ways:

Enter the link to what you are working on manually, or…

Link your social network settings, automatically, so when you do something at Yelp, it gets published on Facebook.

I’m lucky — the third time I dropped out of college, I was moving towards a Journalism degree. That taught me a lot of things (write less, write in inverted pyramid, headlines are very, very important), and many of those things apply to the Web more so.

Write clear, concise headlines. No one does this better than Jakob Nielsen — they don’t necessarily have to be completely accurate, but the headlines should be interesting enough so people actually want to read the article.

Write in inverted pyramid style. One of the first methods of writing I was taught was writing in the inverted pyramid — put the most important items first. This comes from journalism where sometimes articles have to be edited down because of space constraints, and even has more importance because of the difference of screen sizes. The inverted pyramid has an additional benefit: search engines love this method of writing, so much so that it’ll index these pages much higher.

Long paragraphs should be edited down. For many of the news stories I used to write, we’d use only one or two sentences per paragraph (again, easier to edit). The same goes for the web. If it’s longer than a few sentences, think of breaking up the paragraph so it’s easier to read.

Long articles should be paired down, or split into multiple articles. Studies have shown that people read 25 percent slower on screen versus print. Who wants to read a 500 word article on an iPhone?

Articles should almost designed so they can be scanned. Notice how I use bold to illustrate main points, and normal text to elaborate. Bullet lists to illustrate points, quotes from other articles split out, and many paragraphs breaks make articles easy to be read.

It’s all about writing for the medium, and remembering the target audience. If you don’t, you are failing them.

I know this has been around for a while, but I still think it’s relevant — Mike Davidson does a great job of showing how to design an effective MySpace page. He also gives you a sample page to start from so you can customized based off of that.

How much does User Experience mean for each of these examples? For all of them, it means everything.

Apple has made its mark by building products so cool and so easy to use that they have their own fanatical customer base.

Amazon is so good, you expect it to find books for you.

Google, it’s all about straight forward applications that feel right.

eBay’s improved usability and the garage sale feel of the pages (not in a derisive manner, of course) makes it the biggest marketplace in the world where everyone can sell, buy, and participate.

Craigslist’s free-for-all design that’s grey works in part because it has the feel of the non-profit with humble living spaces in Inner Sunset, San Francisco.

For each example, how their products work and how they feel is the User Experience and brand, and prove that superior design means superior results. It also shows in some cases (Apple, for example) that superior User Experiences mean people will pay for more them than other products (how many other MP3 players can you name?) in the same way people will pay for better cars like BMWs.

In fact, their User Experiences are so good, they are their own marketing vehicles. Is yours?